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George E. Smith - Biographical

I was born in White Plains, New York in 1930. I grew up in several different
states and attended a variety of primary and secondary schools. Upon
graduation from high school in 1948, I joined the U.S. Navy where I spent
four years as an aerographer’s mate (weatherman), part of it during the
Korean War. While stationed in Miami, Florida, I managed to take enough
courses at the University of Miami to qualify as a starting sophomore at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1952. Since I served during the Korean War, I
qualified for the GI Bill, which helped pay tuition. I majored in Physics and
graduated with honors in 1955. I married right after graduation. I was
accepted into the graduate program at the University of Chicago with a job
as teaching assistant and graduated there in 1959 with a Ph.D. in Physics.
During that time I also received grants from the National Science Foundation
and Bell Telephone Laboratories. Upon graduation, I was offered a job with
the Research area of Bell Labs and accepted it. I never bothered to interview
at any other institution.

I was assigned to a new department, headed by Bill Boyle, where I started
out continuing along the lines of my thesis topic, studying the electronic
properties of semimetals. I branched out into other fields as well, including
thermoelectric cooling materials and low temperature electronic devices.
During the five years in that position I generated many papers and patents.
Bill was then promoted to Director of the exploratory semiconductor device
development laboratory and he offered me the position as head of a new
department entitled Device Concepts. Several bright, imaginative people
were assigned to my group and I was given the mandate to hire more of the
same. Many fields were pursued including junction lasers, semiconducting
ferroelectrics, electroluminescence, transition metal oxides, and the silicon
diode array camera tube. In 1969, Bill and I invented the Charge Coupled
Device and much of my time was then spent in that field. In addition, my
department was renamed the VLSI Device Department where responsibilities
covered the physics of devices made with submicron lithography and their
use in high performance digital and analog circuits.

In the realm of academic recognition, I have been a member of Pi Mu
Epsilon, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi. I was made a fellow of the Institute
of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, Fellow of the American Physical
Society and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. I hold 31 US
patents and am the author of over 40 papers. I was founding editor of the IEEE
publication “Electron Device Letters”.

My major technical accomplishment, of course, was the inception of the
Charge Coupled Device with Willard S. Boyle. We hold the basic patent
(US 3,858,232) and published the first paper disclosing the device concept
accompanied by a paper on its experimental verification. A following invention
of the Buried Channel Charge Coupled Device (US patent 3,792,322)
significantly improved the performance of the original CCD. These accomplishments
have been recognized in the following awards:

On the personal side, I had always wanted to sail and purchased my first boat
right after joining Bell Labs and sailed it and subsequent boats on Barnegat
Bay, about halfway down the coast of New Jersey. My wife also enjoyed sailing
but she passed away in 1975. I then commenced to raise children aged 10, 11
and 14 as a single parent. No comment necessary. Two years later, I became
partners with Janet Murphy who also loved sailing and we had many adventures
sailing a small (22 foot) cabin boat from Northeast Harbor, Maine to
Beaufort, North Carolina. We both decided to retire (she was a teacher) early
and sail around the world. To do this, we had a seagoing 31-foot Southern
Cross, named Apogee, semi custom built for the task in Bristol, Rhode Island
in 1983. After two shakedown trips to Bermuda, we retired in 1986 and started
around the world. We did not get back until 2003, although we occasionally
flew home for a short visit. We now live in our home on a lagoon leading
to Barnegat Bay. Apogee is moored to our dock in the back yard and we still
enjoy sailing on the bay.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.